Les Bonnes Choses

A few days ago, I was complaining about the way that life begins with a Social Security number down here. You can't do anything without it, and just about everybody asks for it (though with the exception of your employer and banks, both of whom pay you money, your are not obliged to give it out to anybody). Thus, millions of Americans trust their key piece of identification in the hands of minimum wage employees every day. So there's a certain amount of schadenfreude that I experience when I read that the chairman of the fed was a victim of identity theft. It's not quite irony, because Ben Bernake doesn't administer the Social Security office, but it's kind of poetic nonetheless.

You know, there are methods, known to cryptographers, of devising sets of numbers, one publicly known and the other private, that might be useful in this sort of situation, Using something like RSA would require an overhaul of how SSNs are administered, but maybe the savings might be worth it.

I was all prepared to mock the UK government after reading this BBC article, entitled Tax rise as UK debt hits record :

The chancellor tore up a key New Labour election pledge by unveiling a new 50p tax rate for earnings over £150,000

I was under the impression that p stood for pence, which would amount to the government trying to dig their way out of a record debt by asking the country's well-to-do to check between the cushions for loose change.

Instead, I will be mocking the BBC for using the amazingly ambiguous p as a stand in for the universally understood '%' sign. Maybe it's a keyboard thing. We don't have the £ symbol on our keyboards, so they probably don't have the $ symbol on theirs. Perhaps the online copy editors just took it too far and assumed that, in addition to missing the symbol for pounds sterling, we might not also have access to some of these other key glyphs. Except maybe the ones used to spam about \/!@GR@ and (!@L!$ -- those must be pretty much universal.

I've heard it said that the London Free Press "is a rag". Now, I've read it, and I can't really complain about the level of literacy of the writers. Really, the biggest complaint I'd have is that there's very little to it - a large part of it is taken up by full-page car ads, or else classifieds and obituaries. Now, I don't know how much the freeps are to be blamed for this. After all, this is London, Ontario. It's a regional center for a sleepy region. Of course, this is a chicken-and-egg situation: small-c conservative Londoners have a reputation for not being especially interested in anything. Aside from small pockets (most of which I seem to have my hands in, indirectly at least through Rebecca and her network of musician friends), we don't have a thriving arts scene - as evidenced by the lack of performing arts center, and the fact that Orchestra London and the Grand Theatre always seem to be teetering on the edge of oblivion. But when the only time these organizations come to mind is when they're in the news because they're broke, it's not hard to imagine how they came to be that way, and how the situation is likely to continue. The only thriving arts venue seems to be the JLC, which seems to be getting by quite nicely on the back of mainstream entertainers - of the sort that one might expect to read about in the paper. Which brings me back (or rather, awkwardly segued back) to my original point about the Free Press: aside from the Banditos trial, the only other newsworthy content to be found usually concerns the most recent performance at the John Labatt Center. So when I get a phone call from a telemarketer on behalf of the Freeps, I feel uncomfortable with telling them, "look, your publication is crap. The only thing I would be interested in is the Sudoku puzzle, which I can get online for free anyways." Instead, I tell them (truthfully) that I'm moving out of the city. I will add that this excuse works quite well for many phone pitches, especially when you're moving out of the country.

I know that newspapers everywhere are folding - pun originally not intended, but then deemed clever enough to be claimed as deliberate. There are many reasons: alternative internet news sources from all over the world, decline in ad revenue because advertisers are also going to the internet where the eyeballs are. And in the case of the Freeps, they also have to deal with the fact that their publication really doesn't provide much that can't be provided by a larger, better staffed paper like the Globe and Mail that also circulates in this area.

150 years ago, there were thriving shipyards all over Canada, and the Canadian shipbuilding industry, with access to our vast supply of cheap lumber was thriving. By 1870, however, steel-hulled ships had come to dominate. If you were a manufacturer of wood-hulled ships, you had a couple of options. You could drag your heels, and keep cranking out the same product that nobody wants. Or, you could find something innovative to do with your workers and suppliers, possibly even creating a new industry. The first person to figure that out is going to come out all right.

Post number two for the day also concerns The Ceeb. This week they have been airing a repeat of the 2008 Massey Lectures by Margaret Atwood speaking on the economy. I would ask why they hell they would get a literary figure to give a talk about the North American economic engine, but that would make me a hypocrite because I'm always spouting off on topics about which I really know little more than the average lay-person. But that just reinforces my thesis that, once you get an advanced degree, you can take it as a license to render your opinion on pretty much any topic that you want and people give you a fair amount of leeway. Anyways, it's not her credentials that are the reason for me shutting off the radio this evening; rather, it's her speaking voice. You know how they have a saying about ugly people: "a face for radio?" Well, she has a voice for newspaper, which I suppose suits her choice of vocation. Ironically, the only other person I can think of that I would find more difficult to listen give that same lecture is former head of the Bank of Canada, David Dodge, who would arguably be one of the most qualified people to talk on the subject. I would sooner have nails driven through my ear drums than listen to that man speak for more than a minute.

Update:
This didn't seem to warrant an entirely new post, but I just learned that I am SO screwed.

A month ago yesterday, I received a phone call from BMO: my abysmally low-interest RRSP GIC was up for renewal (the anniversary was easy to remember: Heather's birthday) and they wanted to know if I wanted to do something fun and exciting with it. I'm young(ish) so I opted to invest in some investment product linked to the [stock] market's performance. If you've been following the stock market (or even if you haven't) you probably know that things haven't been going very well for investors lately. But I figured, hey, it's got to bottom out some time, and by five year's time, things will probably have picked up quite a bit - I'm wagering significantly more than the pitiful return I was getting on my existing investment. The thing was, for some reason on which I am not entirely clear, I had to wait until March 11th before my funds could be invested in this new market-linked GIC. As it turned out, March 11th marked the first day of the current run of positive gain days on the stock market. Is this more than an uncanny coincidence? Absolutely not. But it's happy news for me nontheless. Of course, my fortunes are just as likely as not to go the opposite direction, so this could just be the same sort of experience a lottery player must feel when the powerball pops up 6 numbers that they picked followed by 3 numbers that they didn't.

Still, the Canadian dollar is going back up along with the price of oil. I hope that trend continues. I need to maximize the value of my savings in $US for the move. Once I'm down there, the loonie is free to tank. Unless I get NSERC, in which case, I'll be torn. And oil? I like expensive oil as a disincentive to driving and for innovation of more efficient and cleverly designed automobiles.

...for anyone left standing with a AAA credit rating.
I was just reading an article in Slate about how Sirius XM satellite radio is in a very bad place. I agree with the author: considering the ubiquity of portable music players like the iPod, satellite radio is pretty lame. The author talked about getting out of the satellite business and just market their programming over the internet. Okay, maybe. But what about those 7 satellites they have floating up there? If they're up to the task, snapping those things up in a fire sale to offer satellite internet access would be sweet.

Okay, it's a half-baked idea, but more than once have I left an idea in a half-baked state, and someone else comes along a few years later, throws it in the oven at 350° and makes a mint. It's irritating.